The World Is Safe? Who Knew …

As the American war drums continue clamoring along the banks of the Potomac (thanks to the likes of Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham and others), wafer-thin justifications for American intervention are everywhere.

They tell us Russia’s Vladimir Putin shot a Malaysian plane down … or that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons … or that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.”

“If you look at what’s happening around the world today, it’s almost impossible to say that we’re safer,” Gingrich echoed this week. “The worldwide scene is not a very safe scene.”

McCain added this week that he believes the word is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime.”

Really?

McCain, especially, needs a refresher.

“I’m sure he remembers what happened in, say, 1973, the year he and 590 others were released from imprisonment in Vietnam,” columnist Fareed Zakaria writes. “That year, in Vietnam alone, several hundred-thousand people died as a result of the war. And that doesn’t include the tens of thousands who died in the Yom Kippur War, also in 1973.”

This week The Cato Institute’s Stephanie Rugulo published several charts and graphs from the website Human Progress … data directly contradicting the mindless, self-serving rhetoric of the American warmongers.

Here’s a chart showing how wars are less deadly than they used to be …

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And one showing a decline in deaths from genocide …

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And deaths from terrorism (which remain less prevalent than bathtub drownings) …

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And last but not least the “American Homeland,” which is the only place our government has an affirmative constitutional obligation to defend …

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“Why should you care that fear-mongers try to make the world seem less safe than it is?” Rugalo concludes. “Because, in so doing, the hawks drum up support for policies that may make us less secure and less prosperous.”